There are many types of presenters; those that stand behind a podium, walkers like myself who want to connect with the audience, and people who stand stage right of the screen so they can interact with the images. If you prefer to leave the confines of the podium, presenting with an iPad has been a challenge that has been addressed. You can now use an iPhone or the cheaper iPod touch as a remote control for your slides. This is huge. Take a look at this 2-minute tutorial to see how it works.

You also now have the ability to broadcast your slides over the Web to in-person or remote audiences, annotate your slides in real time, and show more than just PowerPoint content to take your presentations to the next level.

We have been using these features on the Spring 2013 City Tour, and during that time I’ve come up with a few more tips to help make your iPad presentations even better:

Take the iPad out of its case and lock the rotation to keep the screen from flipping during set-up. This will make it easier to find your controls later on.

Consider using the four-finger swipe to go from PowerPoint slides to other apps or your Bookmarked web pages. Click here for a short video tutorial on how this works.

If you are going to play audio, place a piece of tape on the screen next to the audio control. This way you will not accidentally hit the wrong button and turn the iPad off.

If you want to embed a video into your slides and have it play in SlideShark, you can! Read this blog post to learn more.

Additional purchases

My original “7 Tips” also included some purchases to consider, and I continue to use these two:

If there are other presenters with laptops or iPads, consider buying a $25 splitter from TrendNet. This way everything can be set up in advance and you’ll be projecting with the press of a button.

Another $20 investment is the Tablet Handle from Padlette. This will help you keep the iPad dongle in place so that it will not accidentally disconnect (which isn’t much fun when it happens in the middle of your presentation).

Broadcasting

Earlier, I mentioned the SlideShark Broadcasting feature. This lets anybody in the room with a laptop, smartphone or tablet to see your slides from their internet-connected device. All you have to do is send the people in the room to SlideShark.com and click the Join a Broadcast button. I would suggest changing your user name to something simple and easy to spell so your audience can log-in quickly.

Of course, you might ask yourself, “Why would I want somebody in the audience to be looking at their screens while I’m talking?” Look at it this way:

First, they are doing it anyway, so let’s take advantage of it.

We all have slides that can be a challenge for people in the back of the room to see, so this eliminates that problem.